CHAPTER 1
DARIO
ST. NICHOLAS STREET STATION
It’s after midnight, before sunrise. Baker’s hours. The middle of the night watchman’s shift, and the start of the day for morning radio hosts and garbage men.
Now is the time for sleepless men to meet so they can lie, and betray, and find vengeance.
We’re just two guys on a subway platform in the middle of the night. We have no history. No murder, kidnapping, or revenge between us.
Massimo, with the mid-brown hair and hazel eyes of a long-forgotten invader, could pass for an overworked yuppie.
I know what I look like—a swarthy, dark-eyed monster with ready fists.
We meet at the northernmost end, past the stairs to 147th and St. Nicholas Street.
We do not shake hands when I approach.
“Those your dad’s shoes?” I ask. “They look big.”
“You going to make some crack about walking crooked in them or nah?”
I shake my head and look down the tracks as if I’m waiting for the train. Mocking his father’s club foot is too cheap a shot. The deformity never stopped him from running the family with an iron fist. It didn’t stop him from committing a horror that will scar Sarah forever.
“Thanks for meeting me,” I say.
He looks away. The platform’s nearly empty at this hour, but I follow his gaze anyway—and find a late-night commuter reading the morning newspaper.
That’s not a garbage man with yesterday’s Post. My brother-in-law didn’t come alone.
“Fucking pleasure,” he says, seeing that I’ve spotted his man.
I should have expected him to bring backup, since I didn’t follow the rules either.
“Your message was received,” I say. “If you get Sarah back, you’re going to mutilate her and sell her for meat. Got it.”
“You’ve seen all the messages I’ve sent my sister. I had nothing to do with…” He doesn’t want to think about what was done to show me the threat to Sarah. The hollowing. The stitching. The dress. He’d rather talk about anything else. “What do you want?”
I hate asking for this, even as a path to something bigger and better. It’s humiliating.
“Peace.” I spit the word I can’t digest.
“What the fuck?” Massimo shakes his head, looking around as if he can’t meet my eyes. “You can’t be serious.”
“I am.”
“For what?”
“For Sarah.”
So much has happened since they found my greenhouse. Since Sarah met Willa. Since I started to think about a future that’s not soaked in blood.
I clear my throat to pivot from dick-swinging threats. I shake my watch down and glance at it, trying to look disinterested in the hardest conversation I’ve ever had.
“I want the Colonia to find something else to do with their energy.” When I put down my arm, I still don’t know what time it is. “I’ll do the same.”
“You’re really talking about a truce?”
“Call it what you want.”
“Fucking hell.” He laughs to himself. “You aren’t the same guy since you took my sister.”
I’m not. The Dario Lucari who lived the hour before he took Sarah had sold his soul to destroy the Colonia. This is my last chance to buy it back for her.
“I’m offering an end to all of this.”
“You started this war, and now you’re offering to stop it? Like it’s a bargain? And my sister? Remember her? She’s part of the deal.”
I expected him to try this trade, but it still pisses me off. “We’ll disappear. We’ll leave New York. That’s all you get out of me.”
“Why would we do that?” He looks into the tunnel. The light is dim yellow and the air curls unpredictably, catching wrappers and plastic bags in looping whirlwinds—only to casually drop them on the tracks. “For what? We don’t want peace. That’s not some prize. We want you strung up like a side of beef, and we want Sarah back.”
“She’s better off with me and you know it.” I wasn’t sure if he knew that until I see his reaction. He knows. He just doesn’t care. “You want to fight for her, you’re going to have a fight. But then what? Drag her home? To do what with her? Turn her out like a whore? Or slice her up and sell her?”
His flinch is slight and as fast as a blink, but it tells me there are things the Colonia do that he doesn’t like thinking about. He was born human and raised to be an animal. Now he’s trying hard to die an animal. But the real him—the human—keeps slipping out. He’s a soft touch, a reformer, and too much of a coward to change anything before his father is out of the picture.
“We can’t let you live.” His voice is partially drowned out by a warm wind from behind him. A nearly empty train arrives on the opposite platform. “Your deal is bullshit, and it sucks.”
We say nothing for a moment, while the doors open. He hides his anxiety. I hide my regrets.
Say you want peace, Massimo. All you have to do is want it.
Mr. Post doesn’t get on the train.
Revenge is exhausting. It takes up too much mental real estate. Too much time. Too much love. I need all of it for something else.
The conductor’s voice gurgles, and with a double beep, the doors slap closed.
We’re just two men talking.
Wind gusts from behind me. Train on our side.
“I’m not coming to you with another deal.” I shrug, offering to clean up a mess I made.
Massimo’s sneer tells me the discount on salvation won’t result in a sale. “Without Sarah, there’s no deal.”
“You can’t have her. Ever. She’s mine.”
“Our women aren’t your trophies.”
He’s getting mad. This doesn’t amuse me the way it might have before.
“You think you can still live in your house while it’s burning down,” I argue. “You’re pissing in corners and convincing yourself you got a hose. You’re gonna climb out the window or I’m putting out the fire. Those are your choices.”
He shakes his head, looking behind me. This conversation is over. I turn to leave.
“Get my sister out of the way,” he calls, compelling me to face him again. “Because we’re coming, and when we find you, she better not be where she’s gonna get hurt. And you know now what’s gonna happen if we get her alive and prove she’s a traitor.”
What they do to traitors makes my blood hot while my fingertips go cold. My vision is a tunnel, and his threat is the light at the end of it.
“Did you just threaten her?”
The train rattles and rumbles behind me, and the horn blasts with the hollowness of a stuffed-up nose.
“I’ll take care of her.” He goes from threatening her to pacifying me. “She’ll be all right if you send her back and she comes willingly.”
He’s sincere. He’ll try to protect her, but in the end, he can’t push against generations of traditions and win without destroying his own family. He’s a fool. All his promise does is illustrate the risk to her, and I don’t have the vision to see past that.